Why Joe Queenan is wrong about new classical music

It's fine for Joe Queenan to dislike contemporary music. But I wonder where he's been for the last 30 years

Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians

Lord. To read Joe Queenan on new classical music, you might as well think that we really ought to give up the whole shooting match as a waste of time; that what composers have been up to for the last 100 years or so amounts to nothing more an act of monumental hubris, an attempt by a century's-worth of composer despots to convince audiences, against their will, that their atonal awfulness and, as he puts it on Birtwistle, "funereal caterwauling" were essential to the survival of the art form. If he's on the money when he says that there are no audiences for this music and that the project of modern or modernist music is now, and always has been, a busted flush, then, to use a phrase I seem to remember from his review of Birtwistle's The Minotaur on Newsnight Review, the whole thing has been culture's most outrageous "con trick".

It would be if he was right. Let's just take some of the arguments he puts forward against this music and its reception and, being as objective as possible, suggest that the situation may not be as he suggests. Firstly, there's the unvoiced assumption throughout his piece that what Queenan is talking about amounts to a single, definable school of modernist composition, a cabal of nasty composers writing horrible sounds who are all trying to piss off the bourgeoisie. But in his list of "modern" composers whose records he owns "tons of" (four of these guys are long- and not-so-long-dead, by the way, so not really that modern) - Berg, Varèse, Webern, Rihm, Schnittke, Adès, Wuorinen, Crumb, Carter, and Babbitt - there's a pretty huge stylistic, aesthetic, and sonic diversity, like putting Picasso together with Damien Hirst, or Cy Twombly with Tracey Emin. Berg and Babbitt both tarred with the same brush of being too demanding to make a "breakthrough"? Really? Tell that to sell-out audiences at the Royal Opera's last revival of Berg's Wozzeck, or English National Opera's production of Lulu, who loved Berg's naked humanity, but have probably never had the chance to hear Babbitt's Philomel. Webern and Schnittke? You couldn't pick a pair of composers more opposed to one another what with Webern's crystalline beauty and clarity and Schnittke's wild, polystylistic proto-postmodern clutter. As for, say, Carter and Adès, it would take either remarkable narrowness of mind or cloth-ness of ear to hear Carter's opera What Next? and Adès's Powder Her Face (which has just had a sell-out run of performances at the Linbury Theatre at Covent Garden) as in any sense related.

The problem is that Queenan seems to equate a composer making a "breakthrough" not with whether audiences actually go to hear this stuff - they do - but whether he likes it or not. If he doesn't get on with it, that's fine, but it makes the argument a soupcon self-aggrandising. And although he holds up the audience as the final, great arbiter of whether music survives or not, there's some interesting language about the people who go to classical music, who are either "trained seals" or "brash young urbanites". I'd be worried about sitting next to him at the Royal Festival Hall.

So, on to audiences. This is the biggie, Queenan's clincher. From the way he writes, you'd think that any promoter putting on - shock horror! - a piece by Stockhausen, or even - perish the thought! - an all-Stockhausen concert, would be biting their nails in anticipation of a gaping void where an audience should be, and a hole in their finances that they would be paying off for eternity. In Queenan's fantasy-land, perhaps this is what happens. But it's simply not true in reality. At the Barbican and the South Bank for the last 20 years, Stockhausen concerts have packed the place out. And not just with "brash young urbanites", either, but with people whose interest in contemporary art, in electronics, in pop, in sound-art, in architecture, makes them want to experience Stockhausen's soundworld in the flesh.

And you know what? It's not just Karlheinz: Luigi (Nono), Iannis (Xenakis), Steve (Reich), György (Ligeti), Luciano (Berio), and Pierre (Boulez), to name just a few of the giants of 20th-century music, have all had the same galvanizing effect on getting people into concert halls in London in the last few years. This isn't because people want to eat their greens and roughage before they go back to Mahler and Brahms, but because of the unique, elemental, and often joyful power of their music: these composers have opened up areas of imagination that no other music, and no other art, has ever done in the past - and in ways that people want to hear.

In fact, the bolder the programming has been, the more people have come. Yes, if you apologetically sandwich a piece of Carter between Mozart and Tchaikovsky, you're unlikely to give the impression that this is the music that ought to replace the classics in years to come, but that's also, partly, to bark up the wrong tree. There are people who love Brian Ferneyhough but hate Mozart, who go to concerts of hardcore electronica and John Cage, but don't give a monkey's for Haydn or Ravel. Conversely, as the Aldeburgh Festival has proved, especially over the last decade, if you put new music imaginatively in the context of the past, you create connections that audiences understand, appreciate, and you start a love affair with contemporary music. Aldeburgh has, incidentally, probably the oldest audience for new music anywhere in the country.

There is another story in all this, one that Queenan doesn't even mention. The music of the 20th century now dominates most orchestral concerts you will ever hear. Shostakovich, Britten, Prokofiev, Stravinsky - especially the early ballets - Debussy, Ravel, Berg, Copland, Bernstein, Bartok: these are the staples of any orchestra's repertoire now in a way that simply wasn't the case 50 years ago. The reason Kurtag or Lachenmann aren't in the repertoire in the same way is that they haven't composed much for conventional orchestras and, yes, their music requires more time and engagement from its performers than the economics of running an orchestra or large ensemble usually allows; John Adams and Thomas Adès, however, do write for orchestras, and their music is now part of the expanding horizons of Philharmonic orchestras from Los Angeles to Berlin.

I'm not going to deal here with Queenan's assessment of Birtwistle's The Minotaur, both in these pages and on the telly; that's clearly a matter of personal taste. What, for me, was Birtwistle's most moving opera obviously didn't touch him. Fair enough. What's pernicious, however, is that he uses this wholly subjective response as evidence of a terminal decline of contemporary classical music culture: something, in fact, that the mere commissioning and performance of The Minotaur patently disproves.

A final thought. Right now, I'm listening to a piece that's as old as I am, and has been part of my life for about a decade, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. It's "new" only in the weird, specifically music-historical sense that anything after The Rite of Spring is "New music". I don't listen to it because it's a symbol of how sophisticated I am (Queenan has a fascinating psychological take on his relationship with classical music, which symbolised the fact he'd cut his "ties with the proletariat and 'arrived'" - perhaps this is the root of his problem with contemporary music: that it personally offends this part of his identity that he can't get on with 20th century music). It's just because I like the sound that Music for 18 Musicians makes. It moves me in ways that are completely personal, but which I can also ascribe to the brilliance of its composition. Just like Queenan's assessment that he's "not alone" in preferring listening to Bach than the 20th century canon, no more am I alone in going to Reich, or Birtwistle, or Nono, to find there the things that no other music can offer.